Windows 11 updates silently create a mysterious folder on the C drive

On April 8, Microsoft released the latest cumulative updates for all supported versions of Windows 10 and 11. In addition to the usual security fixes and improvements, the KB5055523 update for Windows 11 brought some unexpected changes to the system drive.

Accordingly, the April security updates for Windows 11 have silently created a new empty folder on the C drive. This folder is named "inetpub" and does not contain any files or subfolders. Its properties window shows a size of 0 bytes and says that it was created by the system itself. On online forums, many Windows 11 computers that have installed the April 2025 security update have reported detecting the inetpub folder on the C drive.

This mysterious inetpub folder is not protected, and you can delete it like any other folder on your machine. Currently, deleting this unnecessary folder does not seem to cause any harm or affect running processes or applications. You can also leave it alone since it does not take up disk space.

It appears that the newly discovered folder is related to Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), a platform introduced in 1995 for hosting websites and services. Although IIS is still present in modern versions of Windows, it is actually disabled by default. It is an optional feature that requires users to manually enable it through the “Turn Windows features on or off” interface. Therefore, the inetpub folder should not appear on the C drive by default.

Microsoft has yet to share any information about this, so stay tuned for an official announcement from the company. This could just be a minor bug that was accidentally left out of the public release. WebTech360 will update this article as soon as more information becomes available.